I tipped my hat up in surprise. “The chemical agent the Soviets used against their spies in England last year?”
Ruggeri nodded in satisfaction. “Yes, that’s it. Very powerful. A delayed release, though if it was strong enough to kill Bianchi within an hour, we still don’t know how he was exposed. Perhaps his espresso, but we think if he drank it concentrated like that, he would not have made it home.” “Maybe he didn’t drink it until he was home,” I said. “Maybe it was slipped in a water bottle or something. Or another product he had with him. There was the British agent that was killed when it was put into a perfume bottle. It killed someone else too who handled it.”
Ruggeri’s eyes flashed. “Yes, there was. Interesting.”
I set my empty glass back on the table. “Very.”
She shrugged. “Well, it won’t do us any good now. The other problem was that Kertész left the country immediately after. Interpol put us in contact with the police in Budapest, but because of the Novichok agent, it ended up with Hungarian intelligence—I don’t know how to say their name, so I won’t. But that, of course, got AISE involved too. Everyone was convinced the Russians were behind it. That maybe Bianchi was one of Putin’s agents.”
I whistled, legitimately impressed. It was a solid red herring, to the point where I wondered if Calvin had really masterminded it. Use a potent black market agent notoriously created by the Russians to kill their own compromised assets, tie the whole thing up in international affairs, and slip away undetected.
Essentially, what started as a potential run-of-the-mill homicide ended up garnering the interests of both the Hungarian and Italian versions of the CIA—all spooks, all secretive, and all suspicious as fuck. These were people more interested in intelligence assets than solving crimes. A dead professor wasn’t going to motivate them to do shit.
“Did any of them ever get back to you about it?” I wondered. “The intelligence wonks, I mean.”
“No. I only asked because an AISE pig made a grab for my ass when they came to take it over. So I wasn’t going to just let him take my case, too. I followed up with the Hungarians myself.”
I smirked. I liked Ruggeri. She reminded me of my sisters—Lea in particular. Wouldn’t take shit from anyone.
“So what did they say?” I asked. “Anything good?”
“Eh. Hungarians…” She shrugged, but didn’t finish as she took another sip of her cocktail, as if mere mention of the Hungarians was enough to complete the thought.
I wasn’t following, however. “They didn’t care?” I tried.
“Maybe? I don’t know. They said there was no record of this Kertész entering the country any time close to the death. But who knows? They could be lying. They might think we were lying too. Or they might have been protecting their own. We don’t know that Giuseppe Bianchi was a spy. But we don’t not know that.”
I frowned. I was picking up a lot of strange things surrounding the death of Nina’s professor and the actions of her husband, but spy games wasn’t one of them. If Calvin Gardner was a Hungarian or Russian asset, I was the Pope. More likely was the fact that he got the agent on the black market with the help of all his own low-life associates in Eastern Europe. And that people working in intelligence assumed there was an ulterior motive, even if there wasn’t. It seemed Calvin had anticipated that too.
“Anyway, the case, it is closed. Unsolved, though we did not inform Bianchi’s family of the investigation, only that nothing was found, and Professor Bianchi died of perhaps an overdose.” Ruggeri shrugged.
“And now?” I asked. “What about now?”
Ruggeri squinted. “I don’t see what’s different.”
“What if…if I could tell you where Károly Kertész is right now?”
Ruggeri stared at me. “How would you know that? And how would you know it’s the same man?”
“I’d bet my life savings it’s the same man,” I replied dryly. “It’s a long story. But I’ll give it to you if you want.”
She did. And so, I laid out the rest of the details she was missing from the plot. The fact that Károly Kertész was Hungarian, yes, but had repatriated long ago as a U.S. citizen under a new name: Calvin Gardner. My guess was that by 2009, Gardner had used a fraudulent passport based on his old papers when he came to Italy for the purpose of murdering his wife’s lover so he could keep his mitts on her fortune, and in doing so kept the paper trail that would lead back to him almost perfectly clean.
“Károly Kertész is a gold-digging son of a bitch whose lifetime achievement has been extorting an heiress and running one of the largest human trafficking operations in the American Northeast,” I finished. “From what my team and I gathered, he’s been funneling women from all over Europe into prostitution rings for a decade or more. What’s a little murder on top of that?”
Ruggeri had listened to the story with a quiet satisfaction that people got when they were immersed in a really good novel. “Hmm. Very interesting. Very interesting.”
“Interesting enough that you might want to reopen the investigation? Or call your friends at AISE to see if they’d like to help?” I leaned closer. “Any chance your contact at Hungarian intelligence might remember you?”
Ruggeri smile, her red lips spreading with cool, competent knowledge. “Oh, yes. He liked me very much. My husband was not so much a fan.”
I smirked. Ruggeri was hard, but she wasn’t ugly. Yeah, I could see her using her looks to her advantage when it suited her.
“Well, then,” I said when I sat back in
